SAPI: Statistical Analysis of Propagation of Incidents. A new approach for rescheduling trains after disruptions

In this paper, we present a new approach to solve the railway rescheduling problem. This problem deals with the reparation of a disturbed railway timetable after incidents in such a way to minimize the difference between the original plan and the new provisional plan. We use a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) formulation that models this problem correctly. However, the large number of variables and constraints denies the possibility to solve this problem efficiently using a standard MIP solver. A new approach called SAPI (Statistical Analysis of Propagation of Incidents) has been developed to tackle the problem. The key point of SAPI is to estimate the probability that an event, one step of the itinerary of a train, is affected by a set of incidents. Using these probabilities, the search space is reduced, obtaining very good solutions in a short time. The method has been tested with two different networks located in France and Chile. The numerical results show that our procedure is viable in practice.